That was a really interesting conversation spinoff I must say! Hope you all don't mind that I post my experience with tumblrs and simblrs, to answer
J Mzungu 's original question. I have only had a simblr for a few months, so I don't claim to know the ropes. But from observing the simblr community, I roughly categorize them in four groups:
1. Gameplay pics/legacy stories
2. CC uploads and/or reblogs
3. Showcasing builds or Sims or lookbooks
4. Combination of any of the above
And they can be
homogenous (only Sim stuff) or
heterogenous (mixed with personal stuff ie. real life updates, pictures of cats, funny stuff, political issues, etc).
The upside and downside of Simblr is the
randomness of people, it's a little like being in an airport, people talking in different languages going to different places, people of different ages and races, and different agendas (work, holiday, family, relocation...).
Since it is more random (and there is
no restraint or
regulation on what you put on your blog), it increases the possibility of finding someone really special who feels free to share whatever, but to the same degree it increases the possibility of finding a real scumbag.
A lot of simblr is centred around
popularity and accumulating followers, I'll admit even I got caught up in that craze for a few weeks (although I despise the term
follower in this context - I find it reminiscent of cult like behaviour or an ego-based relationship between people who do not consider themselves equal).
But ultimately my take on it now as a semipopular Simblr (700+ followers after 4 months) is that having a high number of followers is
nice, but that's it - it's otherwise
meaningless. Does that mean my relationships with the people who follow me are meaningless? Hell no! Excuse me there.
There are a few people that are now closer than family to me and we write/talk/phone regularly. However, whenever a friendship became more solid it moved off tumblr and onto email/chat/skype, simply because
tumblr is a platform for short, quick interactions not lasting friendships who have page long conversations.
So my experience is that tumblr is great for "finding" people but once you've established a good connection, you need a better medium to continue building the friendship.
About what should you do? Well what are your
objectives? (I mean, I hope you're not creating a tumblr only to make other people happy). If what you want is to have a big follower base (for whatever reason, whether to be in contact with a lot of different people or distribute your cc widely) here are my tips:
(Tips to establishing a well-known Simblr imho)1 - post
regularly (every day, preferably 2x a day) - creating a queue helps with this so you don't have to be stressing every day
2 - find a
target audience if you can (e.g. my main blog is very obviously especially for simblrs of african heritage, it's not exclusive at all but it is specialized), it sets you apart from the crowd and gains you not only focus but a specific follower group, people looking for that tag (eg mine would be "black sim" for blog 1, "alien sim" for blog 2)
3 -
reach out to other simblrs within that group, write them, collaborate with them, and reblog their content. That doesn't mean suck up to them, obviously, just be nice.
4 - you can post
non sims stuff too, some people don't like it, but what makes it nice/acceptable is
1) tagging it
nonsims or
saviorhide for those who don't want to see it, and
2) keeping it
in line with your theme (eg a bakery simblr could post cupcake pictures or videos of favourite cooking shows). It helps if you are suscribed to tumblrs that whilst not simblrs, relate to your themes so you also get inspiration for your cc. I make a personal rule of maximum 1/1 (at most 1 sim post for every non-sim post)
5 - ideally a simblr is mainly
original content, but practically, that's hard to do unless you have a lot of time on your hands. In my case it's not possible, but since I do have a theme, finding little known cc that fits in with my theme is useful, it's sharing discoveries. One of my favourite things to do is search foreign Sim sites, I can tell you a couple if you wish
6 -
mixing things up, e.g. posting work in progress pics, gameplay pics, Sims you made and are proud of, is fine, if only because you want to show a few people you are close to. Ultimately, whether people like it or not - it's your blog!! So blog what you enjoy.
I'm really happy with starting to use Sims 4 Studio forums and it definitely goes straight to the point and once you learn to navigate the boards, it's quite easy to track history, conversations, threads, people; and precisely because it is regulated, there is less time and energy wasted on petty rants or going off topic. And also because it is a forum, you're
much more likely to get an answer of some type soon, versus posting a question on simblr where there may be hundreds of people passing by but everybody is doing their own thing and noone takes responsibility - as noone's going to say, "just checking if you ever got an answer on this?" unless they wanted the exact same thing.
Like I mentioned before, tumblr's upside and downside is randomness and also lack of personal accountability/responsibility, and the ability to post everything and anything without personal restraint/restrictions. This also means however that
someone who doesn't speak English at all, and very especially those who do not use a Latin alphabet, may not feel comfortable posting their stuff in an English forum because they feel they do not have control about what happens to their content or it's just plain too complicated to make the effort, so there is a possibility that many foreign cc creators might "slip through the net". Though we can always talk about and post links to our cc finds in the appropriate thread - I think it's within
sims4studio.com/board/15/custom-content-links (not linking to their content but their posts)- I guess if we can make out the TOU in the foreign language.
I hope I didn't ramble too much!